I have released WMPCDText, a Windows Media Player plug-in that finally adds support for CD-Text to WMP.

There is an option to automatically read CD-Text from unknown CD's. Alternatively, you can also right-click on a CD-track in the Now Playing-pane while the CD is playing, and click "Read CD-Text". There are some other options too, those can be changed in the plug-in's settings dialog.

September 1, 2007: I have updated WMPCDText with a fix for crashes that might occur in wmpvis.dll when a visualization is enabled in WMP. Please re-download and reinstall WMPCDText if WMP crashes when you advance to the next track, and these crashes started happening after installing WMPCDText.

Wanted to say thanks for this excellent program. this ought to be a part of WMP. It works perfectly for me, Im running latest WMP on XP SP2;

Regards,Craig

You're welcome Positive feedback like this is always appreciated.

I'm pretty sure that the current release is already stable enough to be considered a final, non-beta release. The plug-in has been around for a few months now and no problems have been found, except for the wmpvis.dll crash which has already been fixed. This also means that everyone who wants to have CD-Text support in WMP can just install this plug-in without any worries.

Echoing Craig's comment. Thanks for your WMP plug-in. I'm using WinXP Pro SP2 and WMPCDText works great. This should have been built-in, but I'm sure happy to have it now. Now where's that "Thumbs up" smilie ...?

Neil and Vijay, thanks for reporting this. There seems to be a bug in WMPCDText that prevents it from reading CD-Text on some systems. I'll do some tests and try to debug the problem as soon as possible and hopefully I'll have a fix ready by the end of next week. I'll make a new post in this thread when this fix is available for download.

QUOTE (vijaye7 @ Apr 15 2008, 16:42)

Like neil, I am getting the following error for some CDs. After I get this error, CD Player does not recognize any other CDs (after the current CD) without rebooting. I use Windows XP pro with WMP 11.

Do you get the error for all CD's that have CD-Text, or is WMPCDText still able to read CD-Text from some CD's?

I have done some testing but I haven't been able to reproduce the error, so I'm going to need more information:

What CD drive(s) do you use for burning and playing CD's? (brand and model)

Does the error happen on commercial CD's, on homemade CD's, or on both? In the case of commercial CD's, please give me 1 or more titles. If it happens on homemade CD's, what program do you use to burn the CD's? Did you also try WMPCDText on CD's that were burned by a different program?

Does the error message show up for CD's without CD-Text too?

Would it be possible to try WMPCDText on the same CD's, but in a different drive, or maybe on another system?

this program is not working for me on WMP 11 and xp.when i right click on a track title and click read cd-text,i get the error message "an error occurred while trying to get cd-text".these are homemade cd's using nero 6 and all the cd-text shows up in many other players and in my cars.

I have finally been able to fix the "Error while executing SCSI command: SRB completed with error (4)" message and released WMPCDText 1.1 that includes this fix. The new version can be downloaded from my website.

Special thanks to lennie paz for helping me fix this bug and to nottenst for verifying that the fix works on Windows Vista too.

scherz0, are you sure that you're using WMPCDText 1.1? You can check the current version on the About-tab of WMPCDText properties (WMP Options - Plug-ins - Background, select WMPCDText and click Properties). Try uninstalling WMPCDText and doing a clean install of WMPCDText 1.1.

Hi Tim,I just downloaded ver 1.1 (confirmed) and get the same error when right clicking on a track.Both the Settings are checked and when I noticed that the CDText was not showing up, I googled and found this forum.I am running WIN XP Pro SP2 and as with scherz0 I am using WMP 10.00.00.4058.ciao, Dan

Hi all, new to this forum so apologies if the subject is closed. I have the same problem reading track info on home burned cd's. Reading cd text in WMP11 doesn't work with the latest plugin. Reading cd's with nero real player or Creative CM5 also don't read. CDex only works after typing all the info in. It must hold the data within it's own "program" as it's there next time the cd is input. I'm running XP home on a Dell DIM4400 with DVD/rom drive TSSTcorp cd/DVDW SH-S182M (with latest firmware and driver).With the common use nowadays of buying/downloading tracks the creation of home cd's is I would think quite frequent and it is therefore frustrating when playing the cd you can't access or display the track detail. I have use Ashampoo to burn discs but they don't supply cdex data anyway. Also used nero and WMP.Any help greatly appreciated.Mike

Hi Mike, your problem doesn't seem to be specific about WMPCDText, because other programs are unable to read the CD-Text too. According to information on the web, your drive does support CD-Text, but you should double-check this with Nero's InfoTool utility - http://www.nero.com/enu/support-nero8-tools-utilities.html .

If your drive supports CD-Text, then the CD's that you have tried probably don't contain CD-Text. WMP certainly doesn't write CD-Text information while burning a CD. I don't know about Ashampoo, but Nero should definitely write CD-Text when track and disc information is entered and your drive supports it. Go to Recorder > Choose Recorder, it should show that CD-Text is supported. Are you using the latest version of Nero?

Hi Mike, your problem doesn't seem to be specific about WMPCDText, because other programs are unable to read the CD-Text too. According to information on the web, your drive does support CD-Text, but you should double-check this with Nero's InfoTool utility - http://www.nero.com/enu/support-nero8-tools-utilities.html .

If your drive supports CD-Text, then the CD's that you have tried probably don't contain CD-Text. WMP certainly doesn't write CD-Text information while burning a CD. I don't know about Ashampoo, but Nero should definitely write CD-Text when track and disc information is entered and your drive supports it. Go to Recorder > Choose Recorder, it should show that CD-Text is supported. Are you using the latest version of Nero?

Thanks for the prompt reply. I'm using Nero 6.6.0.19 which came with the drive when it was bought. The info tool I had to skip the first part as all disks inserted were "unsupported disk type" but the final info showed CD read text as "yes" but write as "no". Not sure how to "Go to Recorder > Choose Recorder" . Maybe I'll try burning another cd with Nero.Thanks again.Mike

Sorry for not being clear enough, I was talking about the Recorder-menu at the top of Nero Burning Rom's main window. If you open it and click "Choose Recorder", a window should appear showing some of the capabilities of your drive, including CD-Text.

It looks like InfoTool isn't as reliable as I first thought, because it says that my drives can't write CD-Text either, even though I can let Nero write CD-Text to a new CD without any problems, and see the CD-Text information afterwards.

Love this program! It works beautifully!!! Thank you for creating it!!! ...Only one little problem... After installing it, I can no longer use the Toolbar Media Player. I guess I can live with that, but it would be nice to have my Toolbar media player back. Any ideas? Thanks.

Do you mean the Windows Media Player toolbar in the Windows task bar? It seems to work fine on my system, even with WMPCDText installed. Why exactly are you unable to use it? Do you get any error messages? What versions of Windows and Windows Media Player are you running? Does the problem go away when you uninstall WMPCDText?

Do you mean the Windows Media Player toolbar in the Windows task bar? It seems to work fine on my system, even with WMPCDText installed. Why exactly are you unable to use it? Do you get any error messages? What versions of Windows and Windows Media Player are you running? Does the problem go away when you uninstall WMPCDText?

I'll reply for Nobody777 since it happens for me as well. When I click the minimize button in WMP11 (Vista SP2) it used to minimise to a small inline toolbar player on the Windows Taskbar. Since installing your CD-Text add-in this no longer appears. No error messages but WMP11 just minimises to the Taskbar as a std running app button instead of the Toolbar Player in the Systray. If I right-click the taskbar and choose Toolbars, the Windows Media Player toolbar is still ticked but clearly isn't working anymore. Any ideas?

Thank you for the information, NigelS. I have tried to reproduce the bug on Vista but wasn't very successful. There were a few occasions right after installing WMPCDText where the toolbar didn't appear, as you described. But simply closing and restarting WMP always restored it back to the normal behaviour for me, so it certainly wasn't permanent. It could be a problem specific to SP2 but I'll need more time to test that (I probably won't have enough time until the end of June though).

In the meantime, could you please check if disabling WMPCDText fixes the bug? You can disable WMPCDText by unchecking it in the Tools - Plug-ins menu of WMP. Then restart WMP and look if the normal behaviour is restored. If it is, it's also possible that re-enabling WMPCDText will still keep the normal behaviour, just try it and let me know the results.

Another action that might fix it is simply unchecking and checking the Windows Media Player toolbar in the Toolbars menu of the Taskbar. As with the previous suggestion, it can also be necessary to restart WMP after the toolbar has been disabled/enabled.

Thanks for responding. Pleased to say it seems to be working here now. The toolbar came back after a reboot of the PC. Now the CD-Text plugin is working great, I can't believe the feature is still missing from the latest WMP under Windows 7, your plug-in ought to be part of the std distribution. Thanks again,